The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings

by Haining, Peter

It all seems unreal now – that grim red-brick fortress built by the Empress Maria Theresa as a munitions dump. Even at Terezin, the cremation ovens had been busy, and when the American Red Cross had neared the premises sacks of human ash had been dumped into the stream. Over sixty thousand Jews were done to death there, and thousands of cardboard boxes each containing the calcified remains of a human being, abandoned – the Germans had retreated so fast that there had been no time to jettison them. They had kept these remains as a kind of grim “tally” in support of the returns of slaughter made to Berlin.

  Typhus had been raging there when the Russians arrived. The sleeping sheds, void of blankets or linen, mere wooden slats or racks on which human beings were crammed in conditions worse than that of cattle, were separated only by a brick wall from the swimming pool constructed by Czech students, who were afterwards murdered, at an execution yard with gallows and three machine-gun emplacements. The wall opposite was pitted with bullet holes.

  Certain inmates were conceded a temporary immunity by keeping a card-index of the prisoners. It was in no sense a complete record. Mrs H. was probably there no more than a day or so, and nobody had bothered to record her fate. I was certain she was dead, because her few pitiful belongings had been returned to the Jewish community in Prague – a procedure occasionally utilised in order further to demoralise and terrorise such Jews as remained.

  I returned to the hotel in Prague and retired to bed. My third-floor room was large and comfortable, with a hall and bathroom attached. The furnishings were modern – a large wardrobe, dressing-table and double bed with satinwood headboard. There was a bedside table with a reading lamp on it, and there was a large, handsome chandelier, too bright for general use.

  At two o’clock in the morning I was awakened instantly by what I can only describe as a noise like a pistol shot in my head. In that instant my attention was directed to a particular part of that room, just near the door, in the hall or alcove that led to the door of the apartment. I could see nothing, yet knew with every instinct I possessed that something was there. I could even tell its height. Further, I knew – how I don’t know – that it was Mrs H. She was trying to tell me something. The room seemed flooded, pervaded by an overpowering atmosphere of sadness charged with menace.

  In a sweat of fear, and only by a considerable effort of will, for I felt almost paralysed, I reached for the reading lamp switch. The room, centrally-heated, was inordinately cold. The light seemed to dispel the supercharged tension and gradually the fear and horror lifted. I could feel the presence becoming weaker and weaker, until at last the room, except for myself, was empty – a sad, desolate sort of emptiness, a vestigial remnant of the sadness which had flooded the room in that strange way.

  It will be said, I suppose, that my sad mission to Terezin had made some impression on my imagination. I can only say that the experience was very real – a sense of something indescribable but tangible. That incredible, almost electrical tension in the air; that all-pervading sadness tinged with menace . . . I do not think this was a synthetic product of strained nerves. The experience of visiting Terezin, sad as it was with its remainders of mass slaughter, and of crude and needless inhumanity, was not at that time unusual. In one night’s air raid on London over six hundred people were killed and many thousands of men, women and children injured, but I have never heard of a place haunted by the spectre of an air-raid victim. Violence in itself, as I have said before, does not produce these phenomena. There are other factors, perhaps some concatenation of circumstances favouring the “registration” of strong emotion. But even if one accepts that vague hypothesis, there remains a greater puzzle. It might explain ghosts which hark back to the past, treading their old familiar paths and making an endless ritual of once transient acts, but how would it explain an active manifestation of some kind of intelligence after death?

  ALASDAIR ALPIN MACGREGOR was an extraordinary Scotsman of many talents – singer, orator, actor, traveller and writer, once described as “the Last of the Knight Errants” – who wrote books on a wide variety of subjects from biographies to topography and the supernatural. He found his experiences in the trenches of the First World War deeply traumatic and this excited his interest in the supernatural. MacGregor’s books on the subject, including The Haunted Isles (1933), The Ghost Book: Strange Happenings in Britain (1955) and Phantom Footsteps: A Second Ghost Book (1959) are all models of objective research. This next episode also occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

  THE HAUNTED FARMHOUSE

  Location and date: Glen Duror, Argyllshire, 1946

  Few with any appreciable knowledge of Scotland have not heard of Glen Duror, that steep and comparatively short valley running inland from the roadside at Duror of Appin to terminate in a bowl of mountain. On a rushy and nettly spot at the head of this Argyllshire glen may still be seen the ruins of the humble homestead from which James Stewart – James of the Glen, as history denotes him – was evicted in the middle of the eighteenth century; and farther down one comes upon Acharn, the small farm of which James was tenant when the authorities arrested him on the charge of being accessory to the murder of Colin Campbell of Glenure, factor for the forfeited estates of Mamore and Ardsheal at the time of the Jacobite Rebellion, and known in Highland history as the Red Fox.

  In the fall of 1752, James of the Glen – James of Glen Duror – dangled from the gibbet on the knoll overlooking the Ballachulish ferry, but half a dozen miles away – “executed on this spot, Nov., 8th, 1752, for a crime of which he was not guilty”.

  Adjoining the present farmhouse of Acharn, lying in a fertile hollow close by the Duror river, is the old house in which James was living with his wife and family when a shot, fired by someone, brought down the Red Fox by the shorelands of the Lettermore, and in so doing bequeathed to Scotland one of the most fascinating of her historical mysteries. Today, James’s old house, now roofed with rusting corrugated iron, forms part of the farm-steading at Acharn.

  On the hillside, within a few hundred yards of Acharn, and on the opposite side of the river, stand the farmhouse and steading of Achnadarroch, behind which Ben Vair rises steeply, its lower flanks thickly planted with conifers by the Forestry Commission. Indeed, the whole of Glen Duror has been planted in this wise in recent years, and now presents a thriving, prospering nursery.

  The farmhouse is one of the oldest dwellings in the district. It is said to have been built by one of the Stewarts of Ardsheal, an ancient Appin property, the loftier parts of which are to be seen from its windows. At the time Achnadarroch was built, it would certainly have been regarded as a mansion. The old house, whitewashed, and conspicuous against its background of dark-green pines, can be seen when, in passing along that inland strip of the Appin road between Kentallen Bay and Cuil Bay, one looks eastward up Glen Duror. Adjoining the house are not inconsiderable farm-steadings. Immediately behind it, but invisible from the approaches, lies a cottage which, in the days when Achnadarroch was extensively and profitably worked as a sheep-farm, would have been the bothy occupied by the farm-labourers and shepherds. The cottage is inhabited by a man and his wife, who tenant Achnadarroch, but who had sub-let the old farmhouse itself to my friend, Seumas Stewart, of whom you shall hear more anon, and to whom we shall refer hereinafter as Seumas, this being the Gaelic for James, and also the name by which he is now known in Appin – a new Seumas a’ Ghlinne, as it were: a twentieth-century James of the Glen.

  Achnadarroch is a house of many apartments. The more spacious of these are distributed on two floors. There is a series of long, narrow attic bedrooms aloft. With the exception of the Haunted Room (so called because it happens to be a little more ghostly than the rest), which opens off the dining-room, those on the ground floor are large. They are all low-ceilinged, however. The Haunted Room, now used as a bedroom, was once the general storeroom of the house. One cannot but notice the enormous thickness not only of Achnadarroch’s outer walls, but also of those separating its various
apartments. The living room, formerly the farm kitchen, is panelled in pinewood. The large, square tiles covering its floor are old, and lie very unevenly. Scarcely two of them are in juxtaposition at the same level. They all tend to slope toward the fireplace. The passing of the feet of centuries has worn them hollow in places, especially in front of the fire, and at the three doorways and passages leading into and out of this quaint apartment.

  The house possesses nothing in the way of gas or electric lighting: oil-lamps and candles are still the order at Achnadarroch.

  At this juncture, one ought to mention that Achnadarroch and the immediate neighbourhood are haunted by one to whom the Appin folks allude as the Maid of Glen Duror. The Maid is often seen in and about the house itself. She appears at the windows on the ground floor, in the adjoining farm-steading, and also in the lonelier parts of Glen Duror. A little, old woman is frequently seen peering in through the lower windows. Among the commonest of her haunts out of doors are the lower slopes of Ben Vair, just behind the farmhouse. Long ago, it seems, she was employed at Achnadarroch by its original Stewart owners, possibly as dairymaid. In any case, she was often to be seen herding the Achnadarroch cattle in that part of Glen Duror now so completely planted; and there is a local tradition that she was thus engaged when a terrific cloudburst swept the glen, carrying her and her cattle down to Cuil Bay, and out into Loch Linnhe.

  Originally the Maid, as she is spoken of in the district, was a MacColl, one of a clan still fairly numerous in this neighbourhood, since the MacColls, in former times, were standard-bearers to the Stewarts of Appin. Indeed, MacColls have been associated with the five merk lands of Achnadarroch for some centuries. These lands once formed part of the lands of Duror, which were included in the Lordship of the Isles, and which were granted by the King in 1500 to Duncan Stewart of Appin. MacColls were certainly plentiful at Achnadarroch at the time of the Appin Murder. More than half of the twenty-one persons resident there in 1752, and summoned as witnesses in connection with James Stewart’s trial, were MacColls.

  I am told by Mrs Cameron, who now lives at Duror Station, but who once resided at Achnadarroch, that the Maid, in “ghostie” form, has always been kindly disposed toward the Appin Stewarts, and toward their followers, the MacColls. Mrs Cameron herself is a MacColl by birth. During her twenty years at Achnadarroch, she frequently saw the grey wraith of the Maid at dusk, and heard things go bump in the night.

  Of the Maid, several anecdotes are recounted in Appin. On one occasion, a native was walking up the glen, when he met her, to be informed by her that he must leave the district and travel to Australia where, she assured him, he would prosper. She mentioned one other matter which, on no account, was he to divulge. Anyhow, he did go to Australia, where he certainly prospered.

  More recently, an Irishman employed in the locality on fencing some fields, which he did at piece-time rates, was working on a Sunday when he noticed an old woman ascend Ben Vair at a speed which astonished him. She was wearing a green cloak and hood, he said. Enquiring who this aged, yet agile, person might be, he was assured that it could have been none other than the Maid of Glen Duror. This affected him so much that never again did he work on a Sunday, and shortly afterwards felt constrained to leave the locality.

  In the autumn of 1945, I went on a few days’ visit to Achnadarroch. One morning, while shaving in the bathroom upstairs, I heard what I thought was a terrific crash of dishes downstairs, where Seumas meanwhile was preparing breakfast. I paused in my shaving, and went to the head of the stairs.

  “Have you had an awful smash, Seumas?” I asked, leaning sympathetically over the banister.

  “Did you hear something just then, Alasdair?” he responded.

  I replied that I had heard him knock over some dishes, which sounded as though they had fallen to fragments on the scullery floor.

  “When you’ve lived at Achnadarroch as long as I have,” said Seumas, “you’ll pay no attention to that kind of thing. It’s just the Maid of Glen Duror at her antics.”

  A night or two later, Seumas and I were seated in the living room of the old farmhouse, refuelling the fire with logs every now and again, as is the custom during those prolonged sessions for which the late-rising Highlanders are noted. Suddenly we stopped speaking, and looked at each other in astonishment, if not also in apprehension. A steam train seemed to be charging along at the back of the old farmhouse. Its noise increased to deafening proportions as it approached, and diminished as it receded. The house definitely shook under its thundering sway. The clock on the mantelshelf stood at 3 a.m. There could be no train passing through Appin at that hour; and, in any case, the Oban-Ballachulish line (the only one in the district) ran through the valley in front of the house, half a mile ahead, and was completely free of traffic approximately between the hours of 7 p.m. and 9 a.m.

  With palpitating resolution, we rose and went to the door. We opened it to find a night of incredible stillness, hung with stars. The ghost train had passed away into the deep silence.

  FRED ARCHER was for almost a quarter of a century a very significant figure as a writer, columnist and editor of Psychic News, the world’s leading newspaper on psychic subjects. He conducted innumerable enquiries into spiritualism and psychic subjects, always maintaining on open mind and sense of independence when reporting phenomena. Apart from making the subject accessible to the layman, Archer revealed the occult experiences of a number of famous people, notably George Bernard Shaw – who once told him, “I am three-quarters of a ghost” – and Sir Winston Churchill who admitted to a “psychic hunch” during the Second World War which probably saved the lives of members of his staff. This story concerns the actress, Thora Hird, and the events that occurred while she was starring as Emmie Slee in The Queen Came By, the tale of a drama in a draper’s shop set during Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Year.

  GHOSTS WALK ON FRIDAYS

  Location and date:

  Duke of York’s Theatre, London, 1948

  One of Jack London’s most exciting stories had as its central character a “lifer” who was made to spend long periods of confinement in a straitjacket. Unexpectedly, the prisoner found that he could alleviate the bodily torture by practising some form of dissociation that enabled him to mentally travel through time and space and relive the adventures of past incarnations. The book was called The Jacket.

  The story I now relate is Jack London’s Jacket turned inside out, so to speak. For this jacket in no sense liberated. It squeezed tightly and in some cases literally began to choke those who wore it. Yet the garment did not have a forbidding appearance; nor did it conjure to mind the unpleasant associations of a straitjacket.

  It was a woman’s jacket, a short-backed velvet garment, not unlike a bolero. The style had been fashionable in Victorian times, when it was popularly known as a “monkey-jacket.” (The name derived from the similar short coats worn by the monkeys who accompanied Italian organ-grinders around the streets of London at that period.) This particular piece of Victorian finery had survived for more than half a century. Perhaps the events I shall record will explain why no owner had ever worn it to rags.

  When clothes were needed to fit out the cast of a play whose action was set at the turn of the century, the time of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, the jacket was found on an old clothes stall in a street market. It seemed just the right thing to be worn by the hard-worked seamstress who was to be played by the leading lady, Thora Hird – who, incidentally, is the mother of Broadway and London star, Janette Scott.

  There seemed to be ample room in the coat when Thora Hird first put it on. But after she had worn it awhile she began to feel an unpleasant tightness about the arms and chest. For a time she said nothing, attempting to dismiss the sensation as being due to her own imagination. It persisted, however, and grew even worse.

  There came a night when Thora Hird was unable to appear and her understudy, Erica Foyle, had to play the part. It was the first time she had worn the jacket. And she had exactly
the same sensation of increasing tightness which, unknown to her then, had been felt by Thora Hird. Something else happened also: that night Erica Foyle saw the apparition of a young woman – and the apparition was wearing the monkey jacket.

  It was when Erica Foyle mentioned her strange experience that others in the company became aware that something unusual was taking place. The stage manager, Marjorie Page, heard Erica Foyle’s account of her sensations, then later a similar story from Thora Hird. She decided to try the coat herself. It affected her in the same way as it had the two actresses.

  The director of the play, Frederick Piffard, was the next person to be told of these bizarre happenings. His wife put on the jacket. For some time she sat with it on and felt no discomfort. It seemed that she at least was immune. But when she took it off those with her were horrified to see that red weals had risen on Mrs Piffard’s throat – marks such as might have been made by human fingers attempting to strangle her.

  It was at this juncture that I was brought into the story. Freddie Piffard, with whom I had a slight acquaintance, telephoned to see if I could help to solve the mystery. After hearing the personal accounts of their experiences given by the people concerned, I arranged to hold a séance on the stage of the theatre – the Duke of York’s in St Martin’s Lane – where the play was being presented.

  Late evening, after the performance, seemed to be the best time to bring together all the people involved. It was turning the last hour to midnight before we were ready to begin. Those assembled included the cast of the play, the stage manager, the director and his wife – and three mediums.

  The mediums had been told nothing of the events leading up to the séance. Each in turn was given the jacket to psychometrize. The first medium was unable to obtain any distinct psychic impressions. The second said he had the feeling that it had originally belonged to a young woman but could say nothing further than that.